9 Big Questions on NASA Infighting for Shuttle Astronaut Tom Jones

Oct 1, 2009

(Photograph by Dimitri Gerondidakis/NASA)

As if a new administration and the rise of the private space industry weren't enough, it's suddenly become an even more critical time for NASA, with its ambitious plans to send manned missions to the moon and Mars while facing mounting fiscal and political realities. The Orion spacecraft at the heart of the agency's next-gen Constellation exploration program is being designed to resupply the International Space Station and fly to the moon, but the space shuttle fleet is due to retire in 2010 and Orion won't be ready to fly in time. The plan is to use Russia's spacecraft to make the supply runs, but that nation's war with Georgia has cast doubt on that plan. Grumbling from engineers and officials inside NASA is joining a chorus of outside critics, so we asked four-time shuttle astronaut Tom Jones to help make sense of the turmoil. —Jennifer Bogo

In the internal e-mail written by NASA administrator Michael Griffin, which was leaked to the Orlando Sentinel recently, he articulates a catch-22 in the space program: If we continue to fly the shuttle past its retirement date, it harms our long-term prospects of manned travel by competing for funds with the Constellation program. But if we retire the shuttle as planned, our short-term prospects are impaired by the tenuous situation with Russia. Have we painted ourselves into a corner? Remember, Griffin was ordered to stop flying the shuttle in 2010. You know, get it off the stage as soon as possible. Then he was told, "Bring on Orion as quickly as you can after that." The original plan, about four years ago, was for Orion to be ready by 2012. But Congress has been given budgets every year by the president that have not included the funds to do these things at the pace they need. So the two-year gap turned into a five-year gap. Congress figured there was no downside: Just let it slip and, big deal, we have a long gap. That was all fine when it was five or six years in the future, but now the Russians have turned unfriendly, and we don't know where that's going to go. And suddenly a bunch of people are saying, "There's this big, long gap, and it's unacceptable, and, NASA, why didn't you take care of this?"

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How dependent are we on Russia for the next five to eight years? Very dependent, and there's not a lot of ways out of it. At the end of 2011, we were going to have to start paying them for a new round of services. One, to launch our people up there—and that would include not only Americans, but Europeans, Japanese and Canadians, who had been promised rides on a shuttle up to the space station. The second service was to have an emergency lifeboat at the space station, so if there's a puncture in the hull or somebody gets sick, we can get everybody back on the ground. Long ago and far away, in 2000, there was an American lifeboat being designed to be flown up to the space station on a shuttle. It was canceled because of funding shortfalls, so we said, "We'll just rent Soyuz from the Russians for that time period." Well, now these two key services, access to orbit and emergency return, have been monopolized by the Russians. We're going to have a very expensive and difficult time getting out of this box that we're in.

How far along was NASA's lifeboat when officials canceled it? It got as far as parachute testing for landing; it was being dumped out of airplanes and parachuted to the ground. It was also being fabricated as a test vehicle in Houston to be launched on the shuttle and given a test flight, unmanned. So it was going to fly in the early 2000s, as a test. Then it was going to be certified and launched to the station as a lifeboat. And that got killed even before the Columbia accident in 2003 because of budget problems.

Where does this budget shortfall come from? NASA has probably exceeded its cost estimates for the Orion and Aries, but, by the same token, since 2004 we've had a billion dollars of Katrina storm damage to NASA facilities that they had to take out of their hide to pay for. And the recovery from Columbia was more expensive than originally foreseen. None of that money was made up with extra funding from the administration or Congress. I've been working closely with Griffin and his advisors, and at least two years ago it was evident that the money being provided for NASA was not sufficient to bring these activities along at the pace that they were promised originally. Griffin has complained about that, but the purse strings at NASA are controlled by the Office of Management and Budget. Unless the president and his people tell those folks to put that amount in the budget to let it happen, it won't happen. I think, as an engineer, Griffin is as good as anybody at explaining problems, and I'm sure he's done that to those folks, and he's gotten a "No."

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As Griffin says in his memo, the perception from the administration has been that they weren't really worried about delays. It really didn't worry them to rely on the Russians, because they assumed the status quo would always be there. But as of August 2008, the Russians are not seen as the reliable partner they once were.

How optimistic are people that a new administration and its space policies could bring more funding to these programs? Griffin is very pessimistic. I think the consensus is that there's nothing about the space program as it's currently structured that makes anybody optimistic that either new administration would be a saviour. The sense is that a new Democratic administration would treat the space problems as Bush's problems. Therefore, they'd be in no big rush to bail him out. They would just maintain the status quo or say, "Hey, we'll try to fix this, but it's not going to be anytime soon." And they don't see a downside, if people don't go into space. On the McCain side, there have been a lot of supportive statements. Actually, both candidates have issued statements in support of NASA in the last few weeks, equally supportive. But on the McCain side it's not clear that they would increase the budget to solve these problems, which is the only way to do so. If the budget doesn't increase by something on the order of 5 percent, it's going to be inescapable that we have the choice of either no people on the space station or the delayed advent of the return to the moon. It's going to be one of those two things.

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How debilitating would it be if we don't extend the shuttle service past 2010 and Orion launches after 2014? Now that the space station is being completed, we'll have a missed opportunity to use it during those five years for substantial testing of systems that, one day, would be used in the lunar vehicle or a lunar outpost. The Russians can probably maintain the space station without an American sitting there and telling them what to do, certainly. The Russians are very good space fliers and by talking to mission control in Houston, they can probably cope with most of the problems they encounter. As long as the two countries are friendly, the Russians could be caretakers of the systems the Americans built and supplied to the station.

The main impact would be the humiliation of calling ourselves the leader in space exploration but having no people in space, no way to get people in space and a space station we paid 80 percent of the cost for, unpopulated by anybody with a red, white and blue flag on their flight suit. It's embarrassing and it's proof of a lack of leadership.

How do you feel about trying to eke another four years out of the shuttle? I can understand the logic of flying it till the space station is complete—that's something I can grit my teeth and do. But every time my friends strap into that thing, it could go kablooey, in a way that we've seen twice before. Not for the same reasons—we've fixed some of the causes of Challenger and Columbia—but it could be a different failure that gets us. There's a phrase in the Columbia Accident Board report that says "We have no confidence that NASA can operate their shuttle over the long term without suffering another accident." We're already five years from Columbia now. As a person who's flown it, I think it's a marvelous machine and I'd hate to lose it—but you can't keep flying a machine that doesn't have the basic technology and safety built into it. So I want to see it go away as quickly as possible. On the other hand, I'm very reluctant to give the Russians a monopoly. So my answer is: If you must extend the shuttle to maintain the flag-waving on the space station for national appearances, if you must do that, then you need to add the extra funds so that you can accelerate the Orion as quickly as possible.

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And if the money for the shuttle came out of the Orion budget?Orion needs a higher level of funding over the next few years to really go toward flight status—that's the way these programs are managed. That ramp-up won't occur if the shuttle keeps flying. Orion is a deep-space spacecraft, and to not field it means you're really pushing the U.S. leadership role to just Earth orbit, where the Russians and the Chinese go already. In fact, you'd be flying a 30-year-old system that has these vulnerabilities that everybody knows about. So you'd be saying, "We're leaders, but we have an obsolete spaceship that's dangerous." That's just not going to stand up to scrutiny. Orion is a safer spaceship. It's going to be cheaper to operate than the shuttle, and it will take us way back to the moon and beyond. We can go to the asteroids with it. So it would be really troubling to lose that opportunity.

How feasible would it be to fly with Japan, the EU or even private enterprises? In the long run, probably they are feasible. But not as fast as Orion could come up on the scene. If you're a realist, and Griffin is nothing but a realist, you have to look at all those alternatives: the Europeans building their own ship with us as partners, or the Europeans partnering with the Russians to provide the new ship, or the Japanese building theirs independently, or a commercial company like SpaceX or Orbital Sciences stepping in. But if you look at where they are right now, and you say, "Hey, I want this to be ready in 2012 or 2013," it's not going to happen. None of those parties have built that level of technology and fielded and tested it. The Europeans and the commercial guys don't have any human experience at all. The Russians do, but they don't have the budget to field a new spaceship as rapidly as Orion. Plus, you'd have the same Russian problem: They would have the ability to just yank support. Orion is in the lead.

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